“She was thirteen years old, Dean says.
“And we were fifteen,” Allison counters. “You can’t expect us to think like adults, even if we wanted to act like them.”
“When did you realize she was missing?” I ask.
“The next day,” Vivian says.
“That part was true,” Allison adds. “We woke up and she wasn’t in the tent with us. We just assumed she had gone off with Tegan and not come back until really late. Then her mom came and picked her up just as she’d told us. I didn’t know that wasn’t the truth until I took the backpack to her house and found out she wasn’t there. I realized she hadn’t actually talked to her mother the night before.”
“Why do you think she would tell you that?” I ask.
Both girls shook their heads.
“I don’t know,” Vivian says.
“It could have been Tegan,” Allison says. “She might have actually been unsure about staying until she talked to him and found out he was coming.”
“Did you tell any of this to the police?” I ask.
They shake their heads again.
“No,” Allison says. “We’ve never told anyone. We didn’t want to get in trouble. But we also didn’t want to get the guys in trouble. They were a lot older than we were.”
“So, you realize your best friend is missing, you know the last time you saw her she had gone off with some guy, and you don’t bother to say anything to anyone?” Dean asks.
“We talked to him,” Vivian says quickly. “As soon as we found out Ashley was missing, we went and found Tegan. We asked him what happened, and he told us the two of them had gone off together, but she changed her mind.”
“About having sex with him?” I ask.
They seem startled by my blunt question, as if either they didn’t think I was following what they were suggesting, or they didn’t think I would actually say it.
“Yes,” Allison says. “Tegan said they just made out for a while and fell asleep. When they woke up, it was really early, and she was upset because she needed to leave. He brought her back to the campground and he saw her running toward the bathhouse. He thought she just needed to use the bathroom, so he didn’t really hang around to watch her.”
“But you just said you don’t think she talked to her mother the night before. So, why would she tell him she needed to leave? If her mother wasn’t coming to pick her up, where would she be going?” I ask.
“It could have been somebody else,” Vivian shrugs.
“What do you mean? Like who?” Dean asks.
They exchange another one of those looks. I’m wishing this wasn’t the first time I’ve interacted with Vivian. It would have been better if I could have gotten the full story from both of them separately. But that’s not an option now; I’m going to have to work with what I have.
“Was there another guy she had been talking about?” I ask.
“Yes,” Allison says. “He was older. We didn’t know him.”
“What do you mean, ‘older’? You just said your boyfriend and Tegan were older.”
“Yeah,” Allison nods. “But they were still teenagers.”
“And you don’t think this guy was?”
“Not by the way she talked about him. I think he was an adult. She’d started talking about waiting for Prince Charming. That’s what she would always say. She was waiting for Prince Charming, and one day he would show up and they would get married. She just didn’t know when,” Vivian explains.
“And you didn’t mention that to the police, either?” I ask.
“I did,” Vivian says.
“What?” Allison gasps, sounding shocked. “You did?”
“They don’t know it was me,” she clarifies. “I called the tip line they set up after she went missing and told them everything I knew. It never went anywhere. I figured that meant we were wrong.”
“Or they just couldn’t find him,” Dean says.
“Are you still in contact with Tegan? I think it would be helpful to talk to him.”
“No,” Allison says. “He died in a motorcycle accident a couple weeks after Ashley disappeared.”
Dean and I sit in the car after walking out of the woods, watching the girls cling to each other again. They stand beside Vivian’s car, hugging and talking in voices too low for us to hear all the way across the lot.
“What are you thinking?” Dean asks.
I don’t take my eyes off the girls.
“That they just fed us a load of bullshit,” I say. “Again.”
“You don’t believe them?”
“This little thirteen-year-old girl was supposedly all wrapped up in some unknown, unnamed adult man, but she went off into the woods to have sex with a teenage guy the night she thinks the adult man might come for her?” I ask.
“They said she changed her mind,” Deans points out.
“According to a guy who died right after she went missing. Don’t you find that a little convenient?”
“Do you think there’s something suspicious behind the motorcycle accident?” he asks.
“No. I think it was an accident. I also think it’s a smokescreen. It’s hard as hell to get corroborating details from a dead man.”
“That’s true.” He looks through the windshield again as the girls finally part and get in their separate cars. “What I don’t understand is why they would change their story. The one they told her parents made sense. She got mad, she left, they thought they picked her up. Why change that?”
“Five years is a long time to try to hang onto a lie. I don’t doubt guys were around that day. It’s just figuring out what they know.”
“So, what’s next? Dean asks. “Can you go back to the police and ask them for the records again?”
“Not the police,” I say. “Track down that tip line. Usually, they’re operated by an outside organization. See if they still have information from when Ashley first went missing. It’s entirely possible to find it still active. They could have recordings of the tips that were left. See if
